BrightLocal

[jmshap]

I'm just curious if anyone else has had terrible experiences with BrightLocal recently. I am so disappointed and will never use them again. I upgraded my account for the rank tracking software. However, most of the locations we manage would show any keyword volume for the location. When I contact their support they told me that they did not support data from that city. It was around 80% of the cities so it's completely useless. Today, one of my employees told me that we ran out of credits for aggregator listings. Last week we had over 150 and we submitted 3 campaigns last week. That's 90 credits. WHen I contacted support and asked for a statement of how I used my credits they told me that they don't do that. I also had some questions for reputation manager and the customer service representative only asnwered the first question I asked. Ignored the rest of my email. I am so disappointed with the software and their service. Has anyone else had any experiences like this?

 

[travelincat]

I have had nothing but great support from them. Their responses to my inquiries have been answered quickly to my satisfaction.

 

[wesduplantier]

Are you on their agency package or an enterprise plan?

Either way, it sounds like you manage a lot of locations. You could try emailing Jon Rana, their head of enterprise development.

We worked with him while considering an enterprise package. Ultimately, we went with another package level but even so, he was very helpful and friendly. I bet he could point you in the right direction, even if their Support can't.

We've been pretty happy with BrightLocal support but admittedly, we've only contacted them for fairly simple issues.

 

[whitespark]

We all have bad days and drop the ball sometimes. If I know Myles Anderson, @StephanieNewton, and the rest of the team at BrightLocal, they'll want to hear about your concerns and see what they can do to make it right and help you out.

 

[jmshap]

We are using the SEO Pro plan. I just used the support chat bot and they didn't seem overly concerned with our issues. Honestly, I just can't seem to find anything that suits our needs to works reliably. @whitespark We haven't tried WhiteSpark yet, sorry. Thanks for the info guys. I appreciate it.

 

[VickyC]

I'm just curious if anyone else has had terrible experiences with BrightLocal recently. I am so disappointed and will never use them again. I upgraded my account for the rank tracking software. However, most of the locations we manage would show any keyword volume for the location. When I contact their support they told me that they did not support data from that city. It was around 80% of the cities so it's completely useless. Today, one of my employees told me that we ran out of credits for aggregator listings. Last week we had over 150 and we submitted 3 campaigns last week. That's 90 credits. WHen I contacted support and asked for a statement of how I used my credits they told me that they don't do that. I also had some questions for reputation manager and the customer service representative only asnwered the first question I asked. Ignored the rest of my email. I am so disappointed with the software and their service. Has anyone else had any experiences like this?

Hi JMshap

Its Vicky here, I head up the Customer Success Department at BrightLocal. Your support tickets have been escalated to me, and my team also alerted me to your message on LSF, so I wanted to reach out personally. I have also replied to your latest ticket via email with full answers and detail - but also wanted to respond publicly here.

Firstly I am very sorry that you feel so let down. We never want any of our customers to feel this way and we put a lot of time, energy and focus into how we support customers and are always looking for ways to improve. We obviously didn’t get this right with you and I personally take responsibility for that and will look into it. We don’t get a lot of negative feedback but whenever we do receive it, I always treat it with the highest priority, investigate it and escalate it, and do our best to resolve it.

Please let me address the 3 issues you raise in turn:

1. No search volume data

We get this data from Google (pulled from their ads planner tool). Google has a database of locations in their ads tool that they are able to supply search term query volumes for.

This database is actually not very big (about 90,000 cities, towns and postal codes). Because of this limited list of locations we can’t always get search volume data for many smaller towns or zipcodes. In the case of the two example cities you provided us with, sadly these aren’t in their ads database so we can’t provide the volume data, and we weren’t able to identify a suitable roll-up city to incorporate them within. I share your frustration with this but Google has the biggest database of search volume data and there isn’t an alternative source we can pull from.

1. Credit usage and reporting

In my email to you I have shared a screenshot of your credits usage report taken from our back office system. This clearly shows what credits you have used on what locations and on what date. Currently this report is not available to view in your account. It’s in our roadmap to make it visible but simply hasn’t been built yet as we’ve been focusing on valuable updates to our search rank tracking and reputation manager tools.

The member of my team who handled your chat wasn’t aware of this internal report which is why they didn’t immediately share it with you. We typically do share it, but in this case the agent had a gap in her knowledge that we have now fixed - and I have also ensured that all other agents know they can & should share this with customers.

1. Not answering all your questions properly

Again, all I can do it put my hands up and take responsibility for this. The agent that picked up your ticket about Reputation Manager initially missed one of your questions. I can see that it was eventually answered but should have been dealt with first time.

I understand your frustration here. We weren’t good enough and we dropped the ball. Please accept my apologies.

I hope that you see my email because it contains additional detail than I have put here. I would also like to arrange a call if possible so I can apologise personally and reassure you of my and my team’s commitment to supporting every one of our customers to the best of our ability.

Thank you Vicky
Head of Customer Success
BrightLocal

 

[jmshap]

Hi JMshap

Its Vicky here, I head up the Customer Success Department at BrightLocal. Your support tickets have been escalated to me, and my team also alerted me to your message on LSF, so I wanted to reach out personally. I have also replied to your latest ticket via email with full answers and detail - but also wanted to respond publicly here.

Firstly I am very sorry that you feel so let down. We never want any of our customers to feel this way and we put a lot of time, energy and focus into how we support customers and are always looking for ways to improve. We obviously didn’t get this right with you and I personally take responsibility for that and will look into it. We don’t get a lot of negative feedback but whenever we do receive it, I always treat it with the highest priority, investigate it and escalate it, and do our best to resolve it.

Please let me address the 3 issues you raise in turn:

1. No search volume data

We get this data from Google (pulled from their ads planner tool). Google has a database of locations in their ads tool that they are able to supply search term query volumes for.

This database is actually not very big (about 90,000 cities, towns and postal codes). Because of this limited list of locations we can’t always get search volume data for many smaller towns or zipcodes. In the case of the two example cities you provided us with, sadly these aren’t in their ads database so we can’t provide the volume data, and we weren’t able to identify a suitable roll-up city to incorporate them within. I share your frustration with this but Google has the biggest database of search volume data and there isn’t an alternative source we can pull from.

1. Credit usage and reporting

In my email to you I have shared a screenshot of your credits usage report taken from our back office system. This clearly shows what credits you have used on what locations and on what date. Currently this report is not available to view in your account. It’s in our roadmap to make it visible but simply hasn’t been built yet as we’ve been focusing on valuable updates to our search rank tracking and reputation manager tools.

The member of my team who handled your chat wasn’t aware of this internal report which is why they didn’t immediately share it with you. We typically do share it, but in this case the agent had a gap in her knowledge that we have now fixed - and I have also ensured that all other agents know they can & should share this with customers.

1. Not answering all your questions properly

Again, all I can do it put my hands up and take responsibility for this. The agent that picked up your ticket about Reputation Manager initially missed one of your questions. I can see that it was eventually answered but should have been dealt with first time.

I understand your frustration here. We weren’t good enough and we dropped the ball. Please accept my apologies.

I hope that you see my email because it contains additional detail than I have put here. I would also like to arrange a call if possible so I can apologise personally and reassure you of my and my team’s commitment to supporting every one of our customers to the best of our ability.

Thank you Vicky
Head of Customer Success
BrightLocal

I really appreciate you getting back to me and dealing with the issues. I will look over the screenshot and let you know if I have any questions. Thank you very much.

 

[Myles Anderson]

We are using the SEO Pro plan. I just used the support chat bot and they didn't seem overly concerned with our issues. Honestly, I just can't seem to find anything that suits our needs to works reliably. @whitespark We haven't tried WhiteSpark yet, sorry. Thanks for the info guys. I appreciate it.

Hi JMshap,

I know that Vicky has addressed your issues at length above and on email and I hope that goes some way to reassure you of our commitment to helping every customers, even if we don't always get it right. Vicky & I spoke at length about these issues today and what needs to happen to ensure they don't happen again in future. Some have been addressed already and others we'll put in place in the coming days.

I'm sorry that you were on the receiving end of a poor experience and thanks for your feedback which, while painful to read, will make us better in the long term.

Thanks and best wishes.

Myles

@whitespark Thank's Darren - I appreciate you jumping to our defence and acknowledging that we care very much about our customers - i really hope the summit is going well and you're not too exhausted!

 

[jmshap]

Thank you. I appreciate it. I'll be completely honest with you. We are a small firm that is growing fairly quickly and really just need something that works. We don't have time to deal with these types of issues but your response has gone a long way. I'm really hopeful that over the next few weeks we can really get everything working how we need it to so we can run our business and be a long time customer of yours. Thanks again.

 

[Myles Anderson]

I hear you and understand. We want to be part of the solution and not the problem and will do everything we can to help you grow efficiently. I hope we can work closely with you to make this happen.

 

[jmshap]

Thank you. Can you please tell me the best way to communicate with you and your team with other questions/issues I am having?

 

[jmshap]

@Myles Anderson good afternoon. I'm still having errors and inconsistencies with the reporting tools. Is there a better way I can get support to hopefully work through some of these issues. When I did reply to Vicky she never got back to me. The agent I chatted with last week gave me misinformation that Vicky had to clarify. Please let me know the best way for me to get support. Thanks

 

[VickyC]

Hi

I am very concerned to note you are still experiencing support issues.

I have had a look at the support tickets you have recently sent in to us, and can see an enquiry received late on Friday, that we responded to via email on Monday (as we do not operate at weekends for support) That one is pending as we are waiting to hear back if you need anything further on this.

You had a live chat with a support agent yesterday, and reading through that transcript that subject is now fully resolved.

My apologies I cannot see any other outstanding support queries received by us, that are awaiting our reply, there is also nothing outstanding on the direct email thread between us that I can see, I have double checked today and everything has been responded to.

However I will reach out to you again today directly via email, so we can discuss in more detail, as I am keen to understand what you are referring to, as we don't want to miss anything and want to ensure we are getting this just right for you.

We offer support across 4 countries and 5 time zones, via email, live chat and by phone, plus we have an extensive help centre for any times we are not available.

Many Thanks
Vicky
Head of Customer Success
BrightLocal

 

[jmshap]

thank you

 

[Kristin Gerhard]

I am experiencing the same issues. No direct answers. Everything seems to take forever with the time zone difference and holiday schedule. I paid for additional consulting services and that was a bust as well.

We prepaid for a lot of service/listings not knowing what we would need. The glowing recommendations and initial joy of the engagement did not pan out for us.

We are a small group that had been looking for guidance and help and feel that we paid well for it. I'm disappointed that we aren't experiencing more of a partnership that we experience with other vendors.

 

[StephanieNewton]

I am experiencing the same issues. No direct answers. Everything seems to take forever with the time zone difference and holiday schedule. I paid for additional consulting services and that was a bust as well.

We prepaid for a lot of service/listings not knowing what we would need. The glowing recommendations and initial joy of the engagement did not pan out for us.

We are a small group that had been looking for guidance and help and feel that we paid well for it. I'm disappointed that we aren't experiencing more of a partnership that we experience with other vendors.

Hi Kristin,

I'm so sorry to hear you've been disappointed by BrightLocal. We do endeavour to respond to support messages as soon as possible and provide all our customers with value, so thank you for flagging these issues so we can work to resolve them.

I've just had a look on our system to try and bring up your account but I'm afraid I can't find anything under your name. Please can you reach out to our support team directly at support@brightlocal.com with a bit more info and we can try to resolve this for you?

Additionally, we don't currently offer add-on consulting services. Can I ask if you have a custom account with our Enterprise team?

Many thanks,
Stephanie

 

[PKLilikoi]

I am experiencing the same issues. No direct answers. Everything seems to take forever with the time zone difference and holiday schedule. I paid for additional consulting services and that was a bust as well.

We prepaid for a lot of service/listings not knowing what we would need. The glowing recommendations and initial joy of the engagement did not pan out for us.

We are a small group that had been looking for guidance and help and feel that we paid well for it. I'm disappointed that we aren't experiencing more of a partnership that we experience with other vendors.

The customer service at Bright Local is usually on point. I would reach out to support once more or send an email as @StephanieNewton suggested. They should reply within 24 hours as they usually do for me.

 

[mandeepb]

Hi Guys,

I thought it would be good to post questions in this thread as I am also having a question regarding Bright Local.

I have been using this for a month now, the experience is good so far. Just one thing I am not sure about that is the Google map rankings for one of our clients. When I check it manually in Google Maps I don't see it on the first page but checking in Bright Local Rank Tracker, it shows #6 which is great for us.

My question is how accurate these positions are in Bright Local? Anyone from Bright Local? Would be grateful

 

[whitespark]

Hey there. I just made a video that explains this! Why Do I See Different Rankings Than What My Rank Tracker Reports?

 

[mandeepb]

Hey there. I just made a video that explains this! Why Do I See Different Rankings Than What My Rank Tracker Reports?

Hey @whitespark

Thanks a lot for the link, I just enjoyed watching it and cleared my doubts. Just one more question, where
could I get UULE for Melbourne, Australia location?

I did check it in another browser where I had never checked rankings, it is now accurate as Bright Local shows. Found the keywords on #7.

Confirmed from one of my colleagues who lives in another part of the city, she confirmed that it is located at #8.

Thanks again